The Seventh International Radiopharmaceutical Dosimetry Symposium will be held in Nashville, TN, USA, April 17-19, 2002. Six of these interesting and important meetings have been held previously, approximately every 5 years since 1970, with distribution of published proceedings which have enjoyed wide use and citation in the literature. Most previous meetings were held in Oak Ridge, TN, and were organized by the Radiation Internal Dose Information Center. Despite the decline in funding and staffing for this center, it was decided that this important symposium series should continue. Due in large part to recent increases in the use of radiopharmaceuticals in therapeutic applications, interest in the international community in this subject area has been such that the series will not only continue, but will increase in frequency. The plan now is for the symposium to be held approximately every 2 years, alternating between a US and European site. Thus, tentatively, the Eight symposium will be held at a site and date to be determined in Europe in 2004. The meeting is attended by nuclear medicine physicians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, and other researchers with an interests in the calculation of radiation dose estimates for radiopharmaceuticals, in their use in nuclear medicine diagnosis and therapy. The goals of the meeting are to update the international community on the status of internal dose models and methods, review experience to date with these calculations in theoretical and clinical applications, evaluate the impact of these calculations in interpretation of data on biological effects of the use of these compounds and develop an understanding of how to link doses and effects in risk-based decision making. This is a particularly important time to have this meeting again, with current rapid developments taking place in trends towards more patient-specific applications of dose models, and from macroscopic to molecular modeling.